Social networking services are online services that allow people to connect with one another and publish or distribute content between themselves and to others. People may publish profile pages describing themselves, send private messages to one another, or publish content to one or more groups of people. Some social networking services allow two users to connect to or “friend” one another within the service.
Because of the number of people using social networking services and the amount of personal data shared via social networking services, social networking services can attract bad actors that pose as legitimate users, such as fraudsters and spammers. Further, unauthorized bots and crawlers can attempt to access the social networking service.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.